Unintended Consequences

Lately, I’ve been hearing about hydrogen fuel cell powered automobiles and how they are going to be so great for the environment because they have no emissions other than “water vapor”. Now I’m all for anything that will reduce or eliminate the flow of US dollars to nations that would do us harm, but there is one question that I have for which I’ve heard no answer and my antennae go up when I hear euphemisms being used to replace perfectly good words like steam.

Imagine yourself in any of our large cities. The date is August 15. The temperature and the relative humidity are in the upper nineties. The afternoon rush hour is just getting under way. There are a million plus vehicles slowly making their way through the city and all of them are emitting steam. What is going to happen to the relative humidity? Will the effect on the relative humidity cause an immediate change in the weather? Are we destined to live in a world where fog and rain become everyday occurrences? I don’t know the answers to these questions, but it concerns me that I’ve seen or heard nothing that addresses them.

Hydrogen fuels cells aren’t the only concern. Let’s look at geothermal energy. Has anyone done a study to examine what the large scale removal of heat from within the earth would do to the earth itself, not to mention the climate of the areas in which it is done? Would it cause a cooling of the earth itself? Would that, in turn, cause cooling of the air in the immediate area? Would that change create new wind patterns? Again I don’t know, but I’d feel better if I heard knowledgeable people discussing such things.

How about solar power? If we were to erect enough solar panels to a large amount of electricity would the affected area be changed by the shading that the panels would create?

We’ve already discovered that there are some unintended consequences of wind farms. Noise pollution and the effect on birds are in the head the list.

The pollution caused by the manufacture of the batteries used for hybrid and electric cars has been exposed as being so harmful that it offsets the benefit of driving them.

Enthusiasm for alternatives to fossil fuels needs to bee tempered with a realistic examination of the consequences they may bear.